HERE’S A THOUGHT: LET’S BIN RADIO 4’S ‘GOD SLOT’

COMPETITIONS have been run to find the most dispiriting regularly heard words in the English language. ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area’ would win, for many. Others might nominate ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’

But for my part, ‘And now it’s time for Thought for the Day with Indarjit Singh’ can hardly be bettered (or rather, worsened). That has always had me lurching with unwonted energy for the radio off-switch.

So it was not with the deepest regret that I read Lord Singh has quit Radio Four’s Thought For The Day.

He does so in protest at what he sees as censorship by the ‘ politically correct thought police’ of the BBC: they stopped him devoting his radio sermon last November to the ‘martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur’, apparently because they thought it would offend Muslims.

To think we had been denied such a thrilling episode of Thought For The Day!

In fact the so-called ‘God Slot’ is reliably soporific, no matter which of the regular speakers is called upon. And that is not just because the BBC, as we now learn from Lord Singh, is determined to block anything that might cause a little religious controversy.

The trouble is that all the sermonisers read from a prepared script. These are trite lectures, delivered with not a scintilla of spontaneity.

Perhaps the only Thought For The Day preacher who managed to sound as if he was talking to us, rather than at us, was Rabbi Lionel Blue.

Alas, ill-health took him off the airwaves in 2012 (he sounded painfully out-ofbreath in his final broadcast, and died in 2016).

It was no accident that Rabbi Blue, with his wonderfully conversational and intimate style, was the only Thought For The Day speaker whom even the most secular listeners engaged with — and missed.

So it’s not just the absence of Lord Singh’s sermons I suspect the nation can endure without going into a state of mourning — but the whole lot of the current Thought For The Day crew.